WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 20: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office at the White House on May 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. President Trump announced his plans for the “Golden Dome,” a national ballistic and cruise missile defense system. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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The Golden Dome defense program is charged with developing a leak-proof shield against incoming missiles. History and basic physics strongly suggest that it will not fare any better than prior failed efforts, like the Reagan administration’s failed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of the 1980s.
Independent experts in physics and nuclear strategy have repeatedly pointed out that the Golden Dome project can’t work as advertised, and that pursuing its impossible goals would waste enormous sums of money. For example, the American Physical Society, America’s largest association of physicists, has done a study that concludes that even building a system that could attempt to block just ten intercontinental ballistic missiles would require 16,000 interceptors. Dealing with an attack by hundreds of warheads accompanied with decoys and chaff would require tens of thousands of interceptors, and even so the system would not be fully leak proof. Building a system of that size will be mind-numbingly expensive, and the likelihood of success would hover between slim and none, with none the far more likely outcome.
Pursuing the dream of a perfect anti-missile system would also be enormously expensive. The conservative American Enterprise Institute estimates that an all out effort to achieve an impenetrable missile shield could cost as much as $3.6 trillion over twenty years.
Despite these daunting challenges, when he announced the Golden Dome in May of 2025, President Trump claimed that it would be finished in three years at a cost of $175 billion — not exactly small change, even by Pentagon standards, but a fraction of what outside experts suggested it could cost.
The failure of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), announced in March 1983, and popularly known as Star Wars, is another indication of why Golden Dome will never perform as advertised. Like Trump, Reagan promised to preside over the building of an impenetrable shield. More than 40 years later, there has not been a single realistic test of a defense against long-range, nuclear-armed missiles. Roughly half of the highly scripted tests have failed to intercept even one warhead, much less the hundreds of warheads hidden among balloons and chaff that would be sent in a major attack.
Congress has the power to scale back Golden Dome, but if it is not done soon, hundreds of millions of dollars could be lost in the meantime. Neither the Pentagon taxpaying public can afford to squander this amount of money when there is purportedly a shortage of missiles and ammunition, along with shoddy and dangerous working and living conditions for military personnel and their families. Outside of the military, excess Pentagon spending is undermining our ability to address non-military threats to our lives and livelihoods, from outbreaks of disease to climate-related fires and floods, to poverty and inequality.
Golden Dome is a bad deal for defense and a bad deal for taxpayers. Congress should scale back the program to a much more modest budget, unless it can be proven — through realistic testing — to have a chance of working against an actual nuclear attack. Otherwise we will severely undermine our ability to address other risks to our security.
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